Lucien Smith, Art-Market Star of the 2010s, Dies at 37

Lucien Smith, one of the most prominent young artists to emerge from New York’s art scene in the early 2010s, has died aged 37.

Born on 15 April 1989 in Los Angeles, Smith was the son of an artist and a fashion designer. He attended New York’s Cooper Union, where his thesis project, Imagined Nostalgia, caught the attention of dealer Jeanne Greenberg Rohatyn. After showing at her New York gallery Salon 94, Smith became one of the most closely watched young artists of the early 2010s.

According to the Artnet Price Database, his work generated $4 million at auction in 2014 alone. Among his best-known works were the Rain Paintings, created by spraying paint from a fire extinguisher onto unprimed canvas.

Smith’s rapid rise also made him emblematic of a period in which collectors bought and quickly resold work by young abstract painters, sometimes for substantial profits. The phenomenon became closely associated with “Zombie Formalism”, the term coined by artist and critic Walter Robinson to describe a strain of process-led abstraction that proliferated during the art-market boom.

Later in the decade, Smith increasingly turned his attention towards supporting other artists. In 2017, he founded the nonprofit Serving the People, intended to provide emerging artists with resources, opportunities and space for exchange. More recently, he had been working to revive FOOD, the artist-run restaurant and community project established in New York in the 1970s. Shortly before his death, four new works revisiting his Rain Paintings series were announced.